Yang’s giveaway makes an important point about jobs

Andrew Yang, who has been called “the internet’s favorite candidate,” turned into something of a latter-day Oprah during the latest 2020 Democratic presidential debate.

The former entrepreneur and currently longshot presidential candidate offered Americans 18 and up a chance to be one of 10 randomly selected families that will receive $1,000 a month for a year in an online Yang campaign-funded raffle.

In other words, the “something big” and “unprecedented” that Yang promised before the debate turned out to be an online door prize. Just visit his campaign website and enter your name, email and ZIP code and you, too, could be a winner.

And, one presumes, added to the campaign’s mailing list. That’s one big reason Yang’s bold move was ignored by his rival candidates who concentrated on their own agendas and various attacks against the so-far unshakable front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden.

If Yang made little impression onstage, he triggered a storm of activity in Twitterland around his signature campaign promise, which his lottery is intended to promote: A universal basic income of $1,000 per family per month that he calls a “Freedom Dividend.”

The idea is not new, although Yang has raised its profile to national fad. Milton Friedman, Charles Murray and other libertarian-leaners have proposed similar versions of the universal basic income to streamline traditional welfare programs. Thomas Paine called for a “citizens’ dividend” in the new republic, supporters of the universal basic income point out.

The difference in Wang’s program is that he would not replace existing aid programs. His $1,000 per month would be delivered to all Americans, regardless of income. That’s too costly to please libertarians and other critics. It also relies on a new tax, which is hardly a popular selling point either.

Yang’s real target, though, is not government tax-and-spend policies but the shrinking job market brought on by competition from new technologies. After having replaced millions of factory jobs with machines over the past half-century, automation, artificial intelligence and other new technologies now increasingly threaten even more highly skilled jobs, such as truck, taxi and bus drivers and food service workers.

Yang’s dystopian vision of the near future seems to resonate well with a broad array of younger voters — particularly the disaffected, and mostly male, ones who have turned out over the years for other maverick candidates, including Donald Trump.

Some of the #YangGang formerly followed the “alt-right,” according to various reports. Some are former “Bernie Bros,” a sometimes pejorative label applied to fanatically devoted Bernie Sanders supporters. Under whatever label, Yang supporters have helped boost him into the top half-dozen candidates in the Democratic field, according to RealClearPolitics’ averages of the top polls, even though his percentage of voters has bubbled along in the low single digits.

Whether Yang’s campaign goes much further or not, he has raised an important issue that won’t go away. As much as some people, including me, have pointed out the role of racial anxieties as a major reason for Trump’s 2016 victory, economic anxieties also mattered. Those same anxieties matter for 2020, too, and shouldn’t be ignored by either party, except at their peril.